Asia

2012

New York, April 25, 2012--The U.S.-based, Chinese-language news
website Boxun has
come under two crippling denial-of-service attacks in the past week as the
outlet sought to report on the unfolding murder and corruption scandal
involving former senior Communist Party leader Bo Xilai. The attacks forced Boxun to change its hosting company twice,
the site's founder and editor Watson Meng told the Committee to Protect
Journalists.

Meng, who spoke to CPJ from his home in North Carolina, said he had not been able to trace the source of the denial-of-service attacks but believed they were in reprisal for Boxun's reporting on Bo Xilai and his ally Zhou Yongkang, the Communist Party's security chief, whose political fate has also been the subject of speculation this month. The first attack, on Friday, was so severe that it not only threatened Boxun but its entire hosting service, name.com. Denial-of-service attacks overload host servers with external communications requests, thus preventing websites from functioning.

Wednesday, the Afghanistan Analysts Network
(AAN) released its report, "Death
of an Uruzgan Journalist: Command Errors and Collateral Damage," by Kate
Clark on the July 2011 shooting death of journalist Omaid Khpalwak.
Clark's details on how Khpalwak died corroborate and then go beyond the
investigation already conducted by the U.S.-led NATO forces who were
responsible. Her report was important to write, and is important to read.

"Of course you have to go to Afghanistan or
to Syria," said French TV reporter Hervé Ghesquière, who was held
hostage for 547 days in Afghanistan together with his cameraman, Stéphane
Taponier, between December 2010 and June 2011.

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The magistrate's hearings into the January
24, 2010, disappearance of opposition journalist and cartoonist Prageeth
Eknelygoda continue at a tortuously slow pace. A correspondent in Colombo shared
the details of the April 24 hearing, where Eknelygoda's wife, Sandhya, and the
couple's two teenage sons continue to press for any news of Prageeth. The family's
attorney said he may have to press Sri Lanka's Appeal Court to order former
Attorney General Mohan Peiris to testify about the comments he made at the U.N.
Committee Against Torture on November 9, 2011, in Geneva. The government
has ignored the January
2012 ruling by the Court that Peiris could be called in as a witness.

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The Friday Times
in Lahore has come under cyberattack. Earlier Friday, its website could not be accessed.

Najam Sethi,
the paper's editor, told CPJ that someone has "launched an attack on the
websites of both The Friday Times and
Vanguard Books [the book publishing
and distribution company that owns the Times].
A tsunami of killer spams and log-ins have clogged the sites and blocked them."

The high court in the western state
of Gujarat defended the media, rebuking a prosecutor for demanding state
regulation of newspaper content. The prosecution sought restrictions after the
Ahmedabad police commissioner filed sedition charges against a Times of India editor and reporter, and
a Gujarat Samachar photographer.

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The ceremony for Murtaza
Razvi was held in Karachi Friday. Even as more details of the killing of
one of the Dawn Media Group's most senior journalists emerge, it's difficult to
discern a motive. Several Pakistani media quoted an anonymous police official
as saying, "We are investigating into the matter but it is a case of murder
because his hands were tied and his body bore torture marks and he had
apparently been strangled to death" with a belt. The official said police are
waiting for the postmortem report.

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New York, April 19, 2012--Pakistani authorities must thoroughly
investigate the death of prominent editor and writer Murtaza Razvi, determine a
motive in his killing, and apprehend all those responsible, the Committee to
Protect Journalists said today.

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When CPJ covered the Pakistani government's attempt
to build a massive censorship system for the country's Internet in
February, we noted a key problem with such huge blocking systems: they are, at
heart, democratically unaccountable.

Journalists and bloggers in authoritarian countries have
their work cut out thwarting governments that try to restrict their writing and
reporting. The last thing they need to worry about is the provider of their
publication platform helping authorities with censorship or surveillance. Cue
the Global Network Initiative
(GNI), a voluntary grouping of Internet companies, freedom of expression
groups, progressive investors, and academics.